Imagine a picture puzzle.... It comes in a box filled with
hundreds of pieces. When assembled, it may depict a landscape, perhaps,
with large swatches of blue sea and blue sky. Imagine my mind is like
one of those picture puzzles, and so is yours. I take one of those blue
puzzle pieces, give it to you, and declare, “Here's a bit of
the picture in my mind. I give it to you so you can see the picture I
see.”

Escaping the pinch of a finger trap

Have you ever felt the pinch of a finger trap puzzle?

A finger trap looks harmless. It's just a small tube made of
paper. Perhaps a jokester friend handed one to you and said,
“Here...stick your fingers in this thing, then pull them
out.” How hard can that be?

So you play along, stick your fingers into the tube, pull,
and find your fingers stuck. Trapped. Pinched.

Also puzzled, and probably frustrated, most of us react by
pulling harder. Getting our fingers out must involve pulling, right? So
we pull harder. And the finger trap pinches tighter.

The secret of the finger trap is our belief that pulling
harder ought to work. But pulling harder doesn't work; that's what
makes it a trap. The solution to escape the finger trap is to push
gently first. Pushing into the tube releases its pinch. Only then can
we carefully remove one finger at a time.

Escaping a finger trap isn't just a matter of pushing,
though. It's also a matter of understanding first how the trap works.
First we need insight into its mechanism. When we discover our initial
belief works badly, that pulling harder pinches tighter, then we adjust
our belief to accommodate a method that works.

Or...not.

Reading the news, hearing the news, watching the news, how
many of those stories are about pulling harder on traps that are
pinching tighter? Why does it seem so difficult to accept that pulling
harder pinches tighter? If it didn't work yesterday, and it's not
working today, why believe that pulling harder might suddenly work
tomorrow?

A finger trap is just a toy, and its mechanism seems simple.
So it's no big deal to adjust our belief about how it works.

If we believe that life is hard, that life is complicated,
that there are no easy answers, that a lifetime of effort to pull
harder must be rewarded, then a simple solution like, “Push
gently,” can seem disappointing. Judging by the news,
apparently we believe that difficult problems deserve difficult
solutions.

There are plenty of times when we claim we seek easy answers.
When offered simple solutions, however, how often do we reject them by
saying, “Well, that can't be right!” ?

The secret to escape a finger trap is to understand it first.
Insight into the mechanisms that trap us leads to solutions that
actually work. What we believe about the mechanisms of our world make a
huge difference in our ability to live freely—or to feel pinched
tightly in a giant finger trap.

Peter Senge's book, The
Fifth Discipline, offers a remarkable source of insight into
difficult situations and insight into beliefs that can trap us.

Warning sign

Suppose we're driving, and we approach a large barricade with
a sign that says,

ROAD CLOSED
BRIDGE OUT

What is our standard of evidence to make a decision?

What if we've already driven past a ROAD CLOSED AHEAD warning
sign every mile for the last 30 miles?

Driving off a cliff, pedal to the metal, just to confirm that
the bridge really is gone and that 30 miles of warning signs really
were there for a reason, that strikes me as unwise and unimpressive
decision-making behavior.

How would we live if beginnings justify means?

How would we live if the phrase, "And we all live happily ever after,"
begins a new story?

We're accustomed to seeing a similar sentence at the end of stories.
It seems to function there as a perfunctory wrap-up, tacked on mostly as a
story-telling ritual.

It seems to me there's always another story unfolding, however, or a new one
that's about to begin. Instead of perfunctory endings, what if we focus on
setting the precedent for the quality of our lives from the beginning?

I take that piece from the sky portion
of my mind's picture puzzle, but you find it fits best in the sea
portion of yours.

“Thanks!” you say,
as you join my sky piece to your sea puzzle. And off we go, cheerfully
believing we have accomplished something, that we have communicated.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The single biggest
problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken
place.”

Sometimes I think of it as the illusion of information. If I
hand you a blue puzzle piece from the picture in my mind, but I don't
describe the surrounding picture from which it came, I set up both of
us to misunderstand each other, to miscommunicate, to see only an
illusion of information.

This site offers a collection of puzzle pieces. These are the
pieces I find most helpful to create a coherent picture of the world
around us.